A Convert of the Mission

"A Convert of the Mission" by Bret Harte is a short story that explores themes of cultural clash, faith, and redemption set against a California mission backdrop during the 19th century. The narrative follows a character who grapples with personal beliefs and societal expectations, ultimately leading to a transformative experience that highlights the complexities of human connection and the influence of mission life on individuals from diverse backgrounds. Harte's evocative prose captures the stark beauty of the landscape and the emotional depth of the characters, making it a poignant reflection on spirituality and change.

• Short story

								
The largest tent of the Tasajara camp meeting was crowded to its utmost
extent. The excitement of that dense mass was at its highest pitch. The
Reverend Stephen Masterton, the single erect, passionate figure of that
confused medley of kneeling worshipers, had reached the culminating
pitch of his irresistible exhortatory power. Sighs and groans were
beginning to respond to his appeals, when the reverend brother was seen
to lurch heavily forward and fall to the ground.

At first the effect was that of a part of his performance; the groans
redoubled, and twenty or thirty brethren threw themselves prostrate in
humble imitation of the preacher. But Sister Deborah Stokes, perhaps
through some special revelation of feminine intuition, grasped the
fallen man, tore loose his black silk necktie, and dragged him free
of the struggling, frantic crowd whose paroxysms he had just evoked.
Howbeit he was pale and unconscious, and unable to continue the service.
Even the next day, when he had slightly recovered, it was found that any
attempt to renew his fervid exhortations produced the same disastrous
result.

A council was hurriedly held by the elders. In spite of the energetic
protests of Sister Stokes, it was held that the Lord "was wrestlin' with
his sperrit," and he was subjected to the same extraordinary treatment
from the whole congregation that he himself had applied to THEM. Propped
up pale and trembling in the "Mourners' Bench" by two brethren, he
was "striven with," exhorted, prayed over, and admonished, until
insensibility mercifully succeeded convulsions. Spiritual therapeutics
having failed, he was turned over to the weak and carnal nursing of
"womenfolk." But after a month of incapacity he was obliged to yield to
"the flesh," and, in the local dialect, "to use a doctor."

It so chanced that the medical practitioner of the district was a man
of large experience, of military training, and plain speech. When,
therefore, he one day found in his surgery a man of rude Western type,
strong-limbed and sunburned, but trembling, hesitating and neurotic in
movement, after listening to his symptoms gravely, he asked, abruptly:
"And how much are you drinking now?"

"I am a lifelong abstainer," stammered his patient in quivering
indignation. But this was followed by another question so frankly
appalling to the hearer that he staggered to his feet.

"I'm Stephen Masterton--known of men as a circuit preacher, of the
Northern California district," he thundered--"and an enemy of the flesh
in all its forms."

"I beg your pardon," responded Dr. Duchesne, grimly, "but as you are
suffering from excessive and repeated excitation of the nervous system,
and the depression following prolonged artificial exaltation--it makes
little difference whether the cause be spiritual, as long as there is a
certain physical effect upon your BODY--which I believe you have brought
to me to cure. Now--as to diet? you look all wrong there.

"My food is of the simplest--I have no hankering for fleshpots,"
responded the patient.

"I suppose you call saleratus bread and salt pork and flapjacks SIMPLE?"
said the doctor, coolly; "they are COMMON enough, and if you were
working with your muscles instead of your nerves in that frame of yours
they might not hurt you; but you are suffering as much from eating more
than you can digest as the veriest gourmand. You must stop all that. Go
down to a quiet watering-place for two months." . . .

"I go to a watering-place?" interrupted Masterton; "to the haunt of the
idle, the frivolous and wanton--never!"

"Well, I'm not particular about a 'watering-place,'" said the doctor,
with a shrug, "although a little idleness and frivolity with different
food wouldn't hurt you--but you must go somewhere and change your habits
and mode of life COMPLETELY. I will find you some sleepy old Spanish
town in the southern country where you can rest and diet. If this is
distasteful to you," he continued, grimly, "you can always call it 'a
trial.'"

Stephen Masterton may have thought it so when, a week later, he found
himself issuing from a rocky gorge into a rough, badly paved, hilly
street, which seemed to be only a continuation of the mountain road
itself. It broadened suddenly into a square or plaza, flanked on each
side by an irregular row of yellowing adobe houses, with the inevitable
verandaed tienda in each corner, and the solitary, galleried fonda, with
a half-Moorish archway leading into an inner patio or courtyard in the
center.

The whole street stopped as usual at the very door of the Mission
church, a few hundred yards farther on, and under the shadow of the two
belfry towers at each angle of the facade, as if this were the ultima
thule of every traveler. But all that the eye rested on was ruined,
worn, and crumbling. The adobe houses were cracked by the incessant
sunshine of the half-year-long summer, or the more intermittent
earthquake shock; the paved courtyard of the fonda was so uneven and
sunken in the center that the lumbering wagon and faded diligencia stood
on an incline, and the mules with difficulty kept their footing while
being unladen; the whitened plaster had fallen from the feet of the two
pillars that flanked the Mission doorway, like bandages from a gouty
limb, leaving the reddish core of adobe visible; there were apparently
as many broken tiles in the streets and alleys as there were on the
heavy red roofs that everywhere asserted themselves--and even seemed to
slide down the crumbling walls to the ground. There were hopeless gaps
in grille and grating of doorways and windows, where the iron bars had
dropped helplessly out, or were bent at different angles. The walls of
the peaceful Mission garden and the warlike presidio were alike lost in
the escalading vines or leveled by the pushing boughs of gnarled
pear and olive trees that now surmounted them. The dust lay thick and
impalpable in hollow and gutter, and rose in little vapory clouds with a
soft detonation at every stroke of his horse's hoofs. Over all this dust
and ruin, idleness seemed to reign supreme. From the velvet-jacketed
figures lounging motionless in the shadows of the open doorways--so
motionless that only the lazy drift of cigarette smoke betokened their
breathing--to the reclining peons in the shade of a catalpa, or the
squatting Indians in the arroyo--all was sloth and dirt.

The Rev. Stephen Masterton felt his throat swell with his old
exhortative indignation. A gaudy yellow fan waved languidly in front of
a black rose-crested head at a white-curtained window. He knew he was
stifling with righteous wrath, and clapped his spurs to his horse.

Nevertheless, in a few days, by the aid of a letter to the innkeeper,
he was installed in a dilapidated adobe house, not unlike those he had
seen, but situated in the outskirts and overlooking the garden and part

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